The following interview with Andrew Buckland was conducted by email in March 2012.

JG:Andrew Buckland, thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed. Since the early 1980s, you have produced work for the Grahamstown Festival. Could you give some idea what the festival was like in those days and how you approached the prospect of performing at it?

AB: All responses to these questions need to be prefixed by the understanding that I feel unable to comment in any authentic way on how festivals contribute to the evolution of theatre in Africa. I have no real experiential knowledge of what the ‘Grahamstown Festival’, and later the ‘National Arts Festival’ has meant for the majority of theatre makers and artists in this country during the time that it has been running, except through anecdote and conversational discussions with other individual artists.

Growing up in Southern Africa between 1954 and 2012, a white person's experience of the country and the world is seriously tempered by a privileged position. I entered South Africa from Rhodesia in 1973 to escape conscription and, clutching a study permit denied to most citizens of South Africa at the time, I immediately absorbed, because of my colour, privileges and opportunities denied those same majority of citizens of this country.